The present invention relates to a computer-implemented method for simulating a rolling tire and estimating noise performance of the tire.
In recent years, in order to estimate tire forces exerted on a rolling tire, a method for simulating a rolling pneumatic tire has been proposed for example as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. JP-A-2002-007489. In this method, a finite element model of a pneumatic tire including its internal structure is prepared, and the tire model rolling on a flat road surface model is simulated. The air is not considered in the rolling simulation.
On the other hand, it is strongly required to estimate noise performance of a tire rolling on various road surface, especially, the ISO road surface used as a standard for tire noise test by the use of a computer.
In order to simulate noise sound generated by a rolling tire, it is conceivable to define air surrounding the tire model in the above-mentioned prior-art rolling simulation method. But, it is difficult to perform an aerodynamical simulation for noise sound and a rolling simulation for the tire at the same time, and it is necessarily to develop a dedicated software. Further, it is expected that the computational time and cost are greatly increased along with the increased computational size.
Therefore, there is a demand for a method which can estimate noise performance of a tire without difficulty, if possible, without developing a dedicated software,